The Coast-to-Coast AM radio program, hosted by Mike Siegel, is the successor to
the defunct Art Bell program. A staple of late night radio, it is heard in most markets
during the overnight hours. According to the host, the program "... deals down the
middle with every issue under the sun." On August 2 (therefore ending early on August
3) the guest was Kent Hovind.

As a scientist familiar with Hovind's material, I was interested in what he would
present on the air, and how he would deal with questions from the audience. I was not
surprised. As a child, I grew up watching a TV cartoon show called Rocky and Bullwinkle.
One of my favorite segments was called Fractured Fairy Tales, in which a traditional
children's story was presented, but characters and plot twists seriously altered the
original message. After listening to three hours of Hovind, I came away with the same
assessment of Hovind's "science": it can sound convincing to someone who is not
a scientist (especially at 2AM), but there are serious errors of fact, omissions, and
misrepresentations.

What follows is a set of excerpts from the first three hours of that program. The
entire transcript is available by contacting the program
Coast To Coast. It should be noted
that I and a number of other scientists emailed the program and volunteered to appear as
guests to offer a scientific response, but we were uniformly ignored by Coast-to-Coast AM.
So much for "dealing down the middle". In the interview and questions that
follow, MS is Mike Siegel, KH is Kent Hovind, and the callers are identified by their
first names. My responses appear in bold, and are interspersed throughout.

HOUR ONE

MS: Considered by many to be one of the foremost authorities on science and the Bible;
you believe that the scientific evidence supports the Biblical record of creation. Give us
an overview of what brought you to that.

KH: I was a HS science teacher for 15 years. I had become a Christian at age 16, and
right away ran into the conflict between what I was taught in my science textbook and what
I'm reading in the Bible, so I knew somebody was wrong, at least as far as evolution goes.
There's no conflict between science and the bible, but there is quite a conflict between
evolution and the bible. And a lot of people kinda automatically assume that evolution is
part of science, and that's where the whole problem comes in. Evolution is actually a
religion. There's no scientific evidence to back it up, and we even offer a quarter
million dollars for scientific evidence to back up evolution. If somebody's got some, tell
him to call in, I'd like to see it.

KH: So about 11 years ago I began this ministry, travelling and speaking on creation,
evolution, and dinosaurs. Our website is http://www.drdino.com ...So I now speak about 700 times per year all over the world on this topic. And we
always invite those who differ or disagree to come to the seminar so we can straighten 'em
out.

MS: Were you always of a strong Christian faith, first of all?

KH: Oh no sir, no sir. I certainly believed in evolution and I believed the earth was,
you know, billions of years old, and, you know, believed the dinosaurs lived millions of
years ago. I don't believe those now...

MS: You don't believe the dinosaurs lived millions of years ago?

KH: Oh, absolutely not. No sir.

MS: Well, how do you explain the findings of the fossils and the aging of the bones?

KH: Oh, I've got a lot of dinosaur fossils here. I love dinosaurs...They even call me
drdino. But dinosaurs are just big lizards that lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden. The Bible teaches that before the flood came, the people lived to be more than 900
years old.

The Fractured Fairy Tales begin. Notice that Hovind makes no effort to explain
what Siegel asked, nor does he provide evidence that supports his assertion that dinosaurs
are "just big lizards". Anatomically, there are substantial differences between
dinosaurs and lizards. Please see
Walking With DinosaursAND Family Tree,
a comprehensive, well-written website dealing with dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures.

MS: So there was an Adam and there was an Eve?

KH: Oh, yessir.

MS: And people, then, the years that we understand a year to be, they lived to be 900?

KH: Yessir, 912 was the average, before the flood. And there's a lot of reasons why
they lived that long. I don't know if you saw the movie "Jurassic Park"? The
amber that they drilled into, to get the mosquito blood out, 'course it's all fiction -
Jurassic Park - but in real life, oftentimes amber contains air bubbles. When they drill
into them, they find out the air bubbles are 30% oxygen. Kind of interesting. [snip]
Dinosaurs are interesting, or confusing, to scientists, I should say, because they have
very small nostrils. And small lungs. So they wonder how on earth did they breathe? You
know, their lungs are too small, they've got this 80 foot-long body, with tiny nostrils
and tiny lungs. Well, today, they probably couldn't survive in our environment, but I
think before the flood came, in the days of Noah, the earth had double the atmospheric
pressure, and there are several reasons for all of this, and 30% oxygen. And under those
conditions the people would certainly live longer, and be healthier. [snip] Today insects
are limited on how big they can get based upon the air pressure. Insects breathe through
their skin. They don't have lungs like we do. They have to absorb it, and the larger an
animal gets, the more problems he has with the surface area/volume ratio. So that a giant
insect, like the spider that ate NYC in the movies is, you know, just not possible. They
can't get that big. However, if you double the air pressure and increase the oxygen
supply, they could certainly get a lot larger. Last summer in Germany a fossil centipede
was found 8.5 feet long. Fossil cockroaches are found 18" long. Fossil dragonfly was
found that had a three foot wingspan. Well, there is no possible way a three foot
dragonfly could fly in today's atmosphere. Just not enough oxygen; and not enough air
pressure. So that the preflood world, I believe, before the flood came, in the days of
Noah, was very different, and had a canopy of water overhead that would increase the air
pressure. And would make the oxygen, oh, 30-35%.

All scientists are simply "they" or "them" to Hovind. For
this Fractured Fairy Tale, Hovind visits the cafeteria of science, and helps himself,
buffet-style, to what he needs. What he is referring to is something called the "Pele
Hypothesis" (though there is no indication that he has a clue where these data
came from). In 1993 Notre Dame Magazine
published reports on a dinosaur extinction theory based upon a drop in the oxygen levels,
see The Dinosaurs' Last Gasp.
Physiologist Rich Hengst, after studying the skeleton of an Apatosaurus, asserted that the
animal (which has small nostrils and no diaphragm) would have a difficult time breathing
at earth's current oxygen level (21%). Paleontologists Keith Rigby and Robert Sloan
proposed that the dinosaurs were in distress near the end of the CRETACEOUS (not before
the flood!) due to a drop in the oxygen level. To support their case, another researcher,
Gary Landis, measured the oxygen concentration in bubbles within amber from Montana's Hell
Creek Formation. These 30 samples, ages 69-63 million years (not 3500 years) did show a
decrease in oxygen concentration from 35% to 14%.

So what's wrong with this picture? First, Hovind is guilty of selective
data-mongering. Gigantism in insects occurred during the Carboniferous (ca 300 million
years ago), not during a time when dinosaurs were dominant. "Most of the various
insect taxa that attained exceptionally large body sizes during the Carboniferous did not
persist after the Permian..." (Graham 1995). Large dragonflies were extinct before
there were dinosaurs. Also, whether the Pele hypothesis holds water or not, none of these
scientists was proposing that earth had a more oxygen-rich atmosphere 3500 years ago, but
69 million years ago. Second, this is one theory, based upon looking at one type of
dinosaur, and oxygen samples taken from one place. I have not been able to find any
articles more recent than the 1993 reports above, which makes me think that these data did
not hold up well. Neither Currie and Padian's Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs nor Dingus and
Rowe's The Mistaken Extinction (both published in the late 90's) mention the Pele
hypothesis except in passing, and neither of these books considers dinosaur breathing
ability to be important enough to address at all. A third consideration is related to an
atmosphere having an oxygen content of 30%. Atmospheric scientist Richard Turco notes that
"At higher oxygen concentrations (perhaps 30% or more of air) vegetation becomes
explosively combustible, so combustion would act to limit the build up of oxygen"
(Turco 1997). This gives a whole new meaning to the biblical metaphor of the "burning
bush".

The "vapor canopy" nonsense was cleanly dispatched in 1983, when
Soroka and Nelson pointed out that a vapor canopy containing the amount of water necessary
for a flood would result in an atmospheric pressure 840X the current one (not 2X)
containing 99.9% water vapor (not 30% oxygen). Let's see how well those big dragonflies
fly under those conditions. Dinosaurs would have been crushed. So would Noah.

Frank Steiger, at his web site
Creationism and Pseudo Sciencepoints out that a 43,000 mile-"high" vapor canopy would have been
required to produce the water needed to flood the earth. The pre-"flood" earth
would have been in total darkness.

MS: So much to talk about with Dr. Hovind. Much of what we have to talk about has to do
with the relationship between science and the Bible. It's really a fundamental debate, I
suppose, and you can break it down to the two choices: creation vs evolution. [snip] As
Dr. Hovind points out in one of his books, there was an atheist Russian astronomer who
visited America and said either there was a god or there isn't. Then he said both
possibilities are frightening. And so, did the universe come about randomly? Was it
designed? I suppose those are the only two ways to take a look at it.

Siegel has fallen into the logical fallacy called the "false
dichotomy", or "black and white thinking". How sad that someone trained as
an attorney is so easily snared. In fact, there are many ways of accepting evolution
and/or an ancient earth and maintaining a religious faith. See
God and Evolution, and
Viewpoints on Evolution, Creation, and Origins.

MS: Dr. Hovind, by the way, what is your specialty on your doctoral work? What area of
specialization?

KH: Well, my doctorate degree is in education. I became very concerned about what kids
were being taught in school, and so I did quite a bit of research on how the evolution
theory affects education. The stuff that's in the textbooks the kids are being taught has
been proven wrong 125 years ago, but they still keep it in the books to try to get the
kids to believe this evolution theory.

[Digresses to free book advertisement] We've got eight lines comin'
here now, book is called "Are You Being Brainwashed by Your Science Book?" [Gives
phone number and website URL]

MS: You talk about what you describe to be the "lie of evolution". And you
say the devil started this lie. Can you elaborate on that point and on what basis you make
the statement?

KH: Well, in the Garden of Eden in Genesis chapter 3 the Bible records that Satan came
to Eve and said, he asked her three questions. He said, Yea hath God said? He questioned,
did God talk, did God say anything? What is God's word? And he said Ye shall not surely
die, so he denied God's word, and then thirdly then he said If ye eat off that tree ye
shall be as gods. The whole idea that man can become a god started with the devil in the
Garden of Eden. And that's really what evolution teaches, that we started off like a rock,
and we're slowly evolving, and, you know, eventually gonna become in charge of our own
destiny.

Fractured Fairy Tale, big time. This is known as the "straw man"
fallacy, where a caricature is put forth, then taken apart. Evolution says nothing about
starting off as a rock, nor does it have anything to say about our destiny. Science
literacy is at an all-time low, and lots of people lap this stuff up. But it's just a
logical fallacy.

KH: [snip] We need to define the word "evolution". Because that's really
critical here. When you get into a discussion like this, you have to define your terms
carefully. And evolution has six different meanings, and one of them *is* scientific, five
of 'em are religious. So what students are taught in school, they're shown lots of
examples of the one that is scientific, and then it is left to the students to assume that
all six of them go together as a package deal.

...And do not exist outside of the mind of Hovind. He has decided to place all
of these disparate events under his convenient little umbrella called
"evolution", and then attack them. But it's just more jousting with the
"straw man".

KH: And that little book that we give out about being brainwashed has a good
description of the six definitions. I can give them to you real quick: Cosmic evolution
would be the Big Bang. There's no evidence for this at all. Nobody's ever seen any
explosion create anything ordered. The origin of time, space, and matter is just simply a
mystery that you have to take on faith. And that's the first step of evolution, is cosmic.

Evidence for the Big Bang comes from at least three independent areas. Hovind
completely misrepresents the Big Bang as an ordinary explosion, and misunderstands that
despite the presence of some very ordered constructs, like stars and galaxies, there *is*
more disorder now than when everything in the universe was in one place.

KH: Then you have to have chemical evolution. The Big Bang supposedly produced
hydrogen.

KH: How on earth do we get the other elements? You know, there's 92 elements. They
would have to evolve.

We do not get them "on earth" at all, and Hovind's periodic table
needs a little updating. There are about 116 known elements. Moore continues:
"Various other elements (heavier than carbon but lighter than iron) are produced by
fusion in the red giant stage of stars. Elements heavier than iron get produced mainly in
supernovae, specifically in the explosive nuclear burning that takes place either during
the phase where the shock wave that results from the collapse of the star's core
encounters the outer layers of the star (for Types Ib, Ic and II supernovae), or in the
general nuclear fireball that Type Ia supernovaebecome. In
the aftermath of a supernova event, the local interstellar medium is saturated with these
heavy elements.", see
Supernovae, Supernova Remnants and Young Earth Creationism FAQ.
For other great supernova sites, see
Introduction to Supernovae
and The Astronomer Online.

KH: Then there would be stellar evolution. Nobody's ever seen one star form. Yet you
can look outside and there's enough stars out there that we know of that everybody on
earth can own two trillion of them. There are plenty of stars out there, but we never see
one form. We only see them being destroyed by novas or supernovas. So stellar evolution
would have to happen, but it's never been observed.

"We" don't see them form if "we" don't bother to look. Fortunately,
astronomers manning the Hubble Space Telescope did not give up so easily, see
Hubblesite Newsletter.

KH: Then we'd have to have organic evolution, that's the origin of life. Nobody's ever
seen non-living material come alive; Redi and Pasteur proved it doesn't happen.

This Hovind Fairy Tale confuses "spontaneous generation" with
"abiogenesis". The two are not the same, and anyone with a decent science
background knows the difference. "Spontaneous generation" is the notion that
inanimate matter could suddenly give rise to fully formed animals - maggots literally
being generated from rotting meat. Redi did disprove this in the 1600s, as did Spallanzi
in 1768; the idea was finally put to rest by Pasteur in the mid 1800s. But this is not the
concept that scientists mean when the origin of life is discussed. "Abiogenesis"
refers specifically to the origin of self-replicating molecules - not cells, and certainly
not maggots - from inorganic chemicals. Life from inanimate matter (ie, maggots from
rotting meat) is not the same concept as organic chemicals organizing, forming complex
structures and reproducing, but it sounds pretty close to the general public, and Hovind
exploits this weakness. For a discussion of abiogenesis and the creationist misuse of Redi
and Pasteur in this context, see
Abiogenesis and also Ian
Musgrave's FAQ,
Probability of Abiogenesis FAQs.

KH: Then we'd have macroevolution, number 5, which is changing from one kind of animal
to another. Nobody's ever observed that. Dogs always have dogs.

KH: And then finally we have microevolution. Now this one is scientific. It is observed
regularly. You know, wolves and dogs probably had a common ancestor. They're very
different, but stand back and look at 'em. It's the same kind of animal.

"Stand back and look at 'em" is the sum total of definition of a
"kind". Neither Hovind nor any other YEC has ever been able to describe a
"kind" any better than this. An email from a Hovind supporter demonstrates this:

"Macro is not the same as Micro and I guess you know that. It's not a matter of
where micro ends and macro begins. Macro hasn't been proven to ever exist, and the
so-called evidences for it are preposterous." ("Janet")

My reply: You can't even define what a "kind" is, and that's what is
preposterous. If you don't know whether horses and zebras are the same "kinds"
or different "kinds", how can you tell whether their differences are on a
microevolutionary or macroevolutionary scale? What about dogs/wolves/coyotes/foxes? One
"kind"? Four? How about even-toed or odd-toed hoofed animals? How many kinds,
and what are your criteria for saying so? Are all frogs one "kind"? How about
New World and Old World monkeys? Great apes? And it absolutely must matter to you where
one stops and the other starts, because you accept the former and deny the latter. You had
darn well be able to differentiate between them besides saying that they're "not the
same."

For more information on macroevolution and microevolution, see John Wilkins'
article Macroevolution.

KH: So when I say the word "evolution", I'm not referring to microevolution,
which everybody agrees happened. I'm referring to anything else above that. And there's
simply no evidence for it at all. And if somebody wants to believe it, that's fine. I
don't care what you believe. But I don't want you using my tax dollars to teach the kids
that it's science. Cuz it's not. (haha)

Hovind does not pay income taxes but is not above using the court system when
it suits him, even if it means claiming to be "an evangelist employed by God" as
well as a resident not of the US, but the "Florida Republic." For
more information on Hovind's income tax problems see
The Hovind Bankruptcy Decisionand
Falsely Claiming Bankruptcy.

MS: Just as a practical matter, as you well know, the US Supreme Court has endorsed the
notion of teaching evolution and excluded scientific creationism from the public schools
as being religious. Which is not to say that's the absolute truth, but it is the final
legal word in this country, so far at least, by the US Supreme Court.

KH: Well, that's not quite what happened. What happened, two states, AR and LA passed
laws requiring the teachers to teach creation. And the courts struck those down in both
cases. Teachers have always had the right to teach creation if they want. But when the
state comes in and tries to mandate that they teach creation, so now you have a different
situation. So the court, as much as I'm not sure I like their decision, you know, they
were probably right in saying the states do not have the authority to mandate that the
teachers teach creation. [snip a discussion on the Arkansas and Louisiana pro-creation
equal time laws, and whether it is currently legal to teach creationism in the public
schools]

MS: Explain to me how you could teach, for example, if you were to teach from a
Christian point of view, and use the notion of Jesus as being divine, and the son of god
and all of that sort of thing, as a former teacher and as an attorney, there is no way
that I can see that you could get away with teaching that without also teaching, in a
comparative religion course, about other religions. In other words, the public schools,
the courts have said, are not the place to promulgate a particular religion.

KH: Well, correct, that's true, the teachers cannot promulgate a particular religion.
They cannot try to convince the kid to become a Baptist or a Buddhist or a Catholic, but
they certainly can present, they can discuss anything, any theories on creation or
evolution. [snip]

MS: I think the only point I was making was that if it were to take a specific
religion's doctrine.

KH: Correct, That would not be proper.

MS: That was my major point. But obviously in terms of the generic notion of scientific
creationism, then, using what you're describing here: the science of that field. Sure. It
would then become generic and it wouldn't be a particular religion. But if you were to use
Hinduism or Judaism or Christianity as the singular basis for the conversation about
scientific creationism, that's where the problem would be.

Siegel totally misses the point. There is no secular "scientific
creationism". It does not exist outside of a particular branch of fundamentalist
Christianity. It cannot be taught without invoking the tenets of a particular religion.
Too bad an attorney/former public school teacher is unaware of this.

KH: Well, see, we already have a religion established in our schools, though, by
teaching evolution. This is the religion of secularism and humanism. Evolution is a
religion. It's not a science. There's no scientific evidence for the Big Bang, for
macroevolution, for cosmic evolution. It's all just something people believe in. And I
respect their right to believe in it.

Not really. It is hardly respectful to call Hugh Ross a cultist and heretic, as
Hovind did on the 10-22-00 and 11-12-00 John Ankerberg radio shows.

KH: I do not want them using my tax dollars to force that down the throat of my own
children.

Never fear! Hovind's children, now all adults, were educated in private
Christian schools! Different things were forced down their throats.

KH: You know, they should keep their religion at home, and they should teach their kids
at home about evolution. But it should not be allowed in the school system at all. It has
nothing to do with science whatsoever.

This is known as "redefining" and using a nonstandard usage. Since
creationists have been unsuccessful at getting creationism into the public schools, their
next tactic is to declare evolution a religion. It doesn't fly. Many secular humanists
accept evolution, and so do many Christians. This concept is not linked to one philosophy,
as much as Hovind would like it to be true.

[snip, break]

HOUR TWO

[snip initial intro]

MS: Dr. Kent Hovind is with us. If you would give us an indication about describing the
world being 6000 years old and what the basis is for that, because even recently I've been
sharing stories with the audience here. We've all been aware, of findings of remains of
Neanderthals going back 100,000 years [snip] Now the feeling is that Neanderthals were
actually far more sophisticated and socialized than we realized. We're finding ceramics
that are that old, that were a part of that society, those societies, if you will. And the
Sumerians, of course, 6000 years ago were writing things, as Zechariah Sichitt points out:
talking about gods coming here, being potentially aliens, beings from other planets. So
there's a lot that's gone on in terms of what one would call science about some of those
issues. How do you square that with the notion that the earth is 6000 years old?

KH: Ah, that's a good question. The dating of certain artefacts like this is certainly
done with a preconceived idea that evolution has happened and there has [sic] been changes
and the earth is billions of years old.

It is difficult to tell whether Hovind is constructing this Fractured Fairy
Tale from ignorance, or just plain lying through his teeth. Radiometric dating is a
concept independent of evolution, and the multibillion year earth age would survive even
if the theory of evolution were falsified tomorrow. For an excellent review of radiometric
dating from a Christian with a real Ph.D. in geology, see
Radiometric Dating - A Christian Perspective.
For a review of young earth arguments from another Christian with a degree in physics, see
Young-Earth Arguments: A Second Look.

KH: If you get into carbon dating which is how most of this stuff is done, at least for
things less than 50,000 years old, it has some really funny stuff they come up with carbon
dating, and I've got a 30 minute answer I give to that on my seminar, part 7, if people
watch my videotape, or on my website drdino.

MS: Well I'd rather we have the answer here. That's why you're on the program.

KH: Sure, I'll give it to you real quick. Carbon dating is based on several obvious
assumptions. If you had walked into a room and found a candle burning on a table, and I
said Hey, when was that lit? And you said Well I dunno. It was burning when I got here. I
said, oh, ok, let's see if we can figure how long it's been burning. So we measure the
heighth [sic] of the candle. Now we can do that very precisely. Let's say the candle is
7" tall. Ok, we get all the scientists to agree it is 7" tall. Now, you still
can't tell me how long it's been burning, but you now have a scientific fact. Let's get
another scientific fact by watching how fast it burns. And we time it with Olympic
stopwatches, and you know, we find out it's burning an inch an hour. Here's our two
empirical bits of science: It is 7" tall; it's burning an inch an hour. When was it
lit? Well, you're kinda stumped at this point because you're going to have to make a few
assumptions. Number 1, how tall was it when it started? And of course, we don't know that.
And number 2, has it always burned at the same rate? And you don't know that, either. When
you dig up a fossil, a Neanderthal or whatever, you can test how much carbon-14 is in it.
Very precisely, by the way. And you can test how fast it decays very precisely. And then
you're kinda stuck. You have to guess how much was in it when it started. And has it
always burned at the same rate? Has it always decayed at the same rate? We know that
neither of those is true.

These assumptions may be true for candles, but they have nothing to do with
carbon-14 dating. See A
Radiometric Dating Resource Listfor real explanations of all aspects of radiometric dating. Wiens' article above also
dismisses this nonsense in his FAQ section. Carbon-14 dating has been calibrated using
tree rings and recently with lake varves (Kitagawa and van der Plicht, 1998), and
potassium/argon dating was verified by its accurate dating of the 79 AD Pompeii eruption,
see Argon dating technique verified.

KH: For instance, I'll just give you a few quick examples: Living mollusc shells were
carbon dated 2300 years old. Science magazine, volume 141. Freshly-killed seal was
carbon-dated at having died 1300 years ago, and they just killed it. That's Antarctic
Journal, volume 6, page 211. Shells from living snails were carbon-dated at 27,000 years
old. Science magazine, volume 224, page 58-61.

These examples are lifted from the "Answers in Genesis" website, and
show only that neither Hovind nor AiG understand the limitations of C-14 dating. Marine
creatures acquire much of their carbon from limestone that has been buried in the sea for
millions of years. The C-14 originally present in the limestones is long gone, so of
course these organisms appear to be old. Anyone acquainted with C-14 dating knows about
this limitation, see Carbon
Dating. More information on C-14 dating and contamination can be found at Carbon 14 - Contamination.

Keith Littleton summarized it very well in a Talk.Origins newsgroup post:
"Radiocarbon dating is like a hammer. A person has to know how to use it properly in
order to build a house with it. If a person is ignorant of how to use a hammer,
then... using a hammer to build a house has problems that go on and on."

KH: One part of a mammoth was carbon-dated at 29,000 years old. Another part is 44,000
years old. Here's two parts of the same animal. That's from USGS Professional Paper #862.

Hovind makes a big-time misrepresentation here. I looked at the data in USGS
Professional Paper 862. It is a 1975 paper by Troy Pewe entitled "Quaternary
Stratigraphic Nomenclature in Unglaciated Central Alaska". It is a description of
stratigraphic units in Alaska, but does contain more than 150 radiocarbon dates. Many of
these dates are from the 1950's and 60's. There are three references to mammoths: hair
from a mammoth skull (found by Geist in 1951 in frozen silt); "flesh from lower leg,
Mammuthus primigenius" (found by Osborne in 1940, 26 m below the surface); and the
"skin and flesh of Mammuthus primigenius [baby mammoth] (found by Geist in 1948
"with a beaver dam"). The dates given are, respectively, 32,700; 15,380; and
21,300 years BP BUT the last is thought to be an invalid date because the hide was soaked
in glycerin.

NOWHERE IN THE PAPER DOES IT SAY, OR EVEN IMPLY, THAT THESE SPECIMENS ARE PARTS
OF THE SAME ANIMAL. They were found in different places, at different times, by different
people. One is even termed "baby", and the other is not. To construct this
Fractured Fairy Tale, Hovind must havehoped that no
one listening would check and see what his reference really said.

KH: One part of Dima, the frozen mammoth, the baby one that was emaciated, was 40,000
years old. Another part was 26,000, and the wood around the carcass was dated at 9000
years old. I mean, in spite of all the hoopla, carbon dating just simply doesn't work.

The only dates I have found for "Dima" are close to 40,000 years BP:
"The field evidence and radiocarbon analysis indicate that the baby mammoth, who was
named Dima, was buried in a bog or small lake by a mudslide 44,000 years ago"
(Newell, p. 66) and "...Dima was dated at 41,000 + 900 BP", see The Mysterious Origins of Man: Atlantis, Mammoths, and
Crustal Shift.
Since Hovind completely misrepresented the Alaskan mammoth data above, it is not
unreasonable to assume that his information about "Dima" is also incorrect.

KH: It's based on some very fundamental assumptions. A couple of Russian scientists
carbon-dated dinosaur bones at under 30,000 years old. Hugh Miller in Columbus, Ohio, had
four dinosaur bone samples carbon-dated, and they came back at 20,000 years old. The only
reason they even dated them is that he did not tell them they were dinosaur bones.

According to Robert Kalin, a specialist at the University of Arizona's
radiocarbon dating laboratory, Hugh Miller's fossils were not bone. Like most ancient
fossils, the organic portion of the bone had long ago been replaced by minerals. The young
"dates" are from contamination and/or carbon-containing preservatives (Lepper
1992).

KH: If you go into an average laboratory and say I've got some dinosaur bones and I
want 'em carbon-dated, they'll say, Oh, we can't carbon-date these, because they're too
old. You see, they assume the age based on the geologic column. You know the geologic
column is taught in every textbook in earth science in public schools. The geologic column
does not exist anywhere in the world. And there's overwhelming evidence that the geologic
column all formed rapidly. All those layers of strata. We find petrified trees standing
up, running through all these layers. I've got pictures of 'em in that little booklet that
we give out, "Are You Being Brainwashed by Your Science Book?" If people wanna
get that we can give 'em one. And lots of data on this. The geologic column all formed
rapidly in Noah's flood.

There is no evidence that the geologic column formed rapidly, and lots of
evidence - like the existence of river channels under thousands of feet of strata, see
Young-Earth Arguments: A Second Look
that argue against rapid deposition. A global flood does a poor job of explaining delicate
features commonly found in sedimentary strata: burrows, footprints, raindrop imprints,
mudcracks, nests, coprolites (what happens when you flush?). See
Creation? These Fossils Say No.
The polystrate trees pose no problem for the geologic column, and are explained at
"Polystrate" Tree Fossils.

KH: In the early 1800's, people started teaching that, you know, the earth is older
than 6000 years old. We had guys like Charles Lyell come along in 1830, and he's probably
the primary guy that developed the geologic column that we use today, with the Cenozoic
and Mesozoic, and Jurassic, and all that kind of stuff. And the whole thing's baloney. It
doesn't exist. The only place you can find this geologic column is in your textbook.

I told Hovind in October of 1998, before a large gathering, that the geologic
column was in use before Darwin was born (1809):

"The geologic column is a concept fundamental to geology, and is one of
the big pieces of evidence that supports biological evolution. These layers of sedimentary
rock were laid down such that the lowest layer is normally the oldest. The lowest layers
harbor the most primitive life forms, and one sees a sequential emergence of more-complex
life as one goes from the lower levels to the higher.

Accusations concerning the geologic column abound in Hovind's publications. He
asserts that the geologic column was "made up" by evolutionists, and that is
exists only in textbooks. What is the reality?

It was devised not by evolutionists, but by Christian creationist geologists
like William Smith. Smith was one of the first to acknowledge and index fossils. The
column was in wide use by 1830, almost 30 years before Darwin published Origin of Species.
(Bartelt 1998)"

Hovind seems content to perpetuate his false history of the geologic column.

[snip]

KH: There's no question the earth has layers, but the question is, how did they get
there? Rapid stratification happened when Mt St Helens blew up there in Washington. It
blew 600 feet of mud down there into the valley. Several days later the Toutle River,
which had been dammed up by this mudslide, went over the top, and washed out a miniature
grand canyon in about 15 minutes. It's a 1/40th scale grand canyon. Washed out in just a
few minutes. When they go down into the canyon today, you notice the sides of it have all
nice neat layers and strata, just exactly like Grand Canyon.

A variation of the Fractured Fairy Tale begun by the ICR's Steve Austin. This
logical fallacy is called a "false analogy". The layers near Mt. St. Helens are
made of volcanic ash, not limestone, sandstone, or shale. See A Visit to the Institute for Creation Research.
The fact that unconsolidated volcanic ash can be easily carved by water does not imply
that consolidated limestone, sandstone, and shale - the rocks that from the Grand Canyon
walls, can be rapidly carved by water.

KH: And you would think, if you went to public school you would think, that each of
these layers formed slowly over millions of years, when the truth of the matter is if you
get a jar of dirt, put some water in it, shake it up, it'll settle out into layers, in
your hand in a few moments.

And, by gum, you get nothing that resembles sedimentary rock! The false analogy
strikes again.

KH: Water automatically sorts particles by density and by their shape, and so the flood
in the days of Noah sorted all this strata of the earth we have through a lot of different
factors, ah, liquefaction, and cavitation plays heavily into[sic]
this destruction of minerals and stuff in rapidly-moving water.

And if this were true, you would see a geologic column with conglomerates on
the bottom, then sandstone, then shale, then limestone. Hovind has refuted the
creationists' flood geology!

KH: But the fossils then are found in the layers and they assume the layer's a certain
age. So if you take in a dinosaur bone, they're going to assume it's about 100 million
years old, and they're going to date it until they get that number. They may have to test
the sample four or five times. Then they come back and say Yup, that's right. 70 million,
or 100 million. Just like we thought. Ha ha ha.

If Hovind has particular information that a particular date is incorrect, he
should supply that information. Allegations involving "they" or "them"
are useless. He has done this previously, accusing "scientists" of finding
Hyracotherium (primitive horses) in modern strata. In October 1998 I challenged him to
present these findings to a reputable journal:

"The geologic column has contributed to what we know about horse
evolution. Here is what Hovind has to say: 'They have taken critters from all over the
world, South America, Europe, and Asia, and put them together in a predetermined area.
They have already decided to start off with the smallest to largest animals. That is not
the way they are found.'

"What Hovind is suggesting here is that 'they' are being purposely
fraudulent. Who are 'they' Kent? If you think that scientists are purposely deceiving the
public, why don't you come up with specific names of scientists and exactly what
fossils are out of place?

"He continues: 'They find them in different layers, but they have it in
the textbooks that eohippus slowly changes into equus, the modern horse. That's bologna',
and 'Modern horses are found in layers lower than eohippus.'

"The only bologna here is what Hovind has written....so much that a link
to the Oscar Meyer website is suggested. If Hovind knows of an Eocene Equus fossil, I
challenge him to submit his findings to a reputable scientific journal." [Bartelt
1998]

That was two years ago. The world is still waiting!

MS: Well, do you agree with the history that says that the Sumerians did writing 6000
years ago? Inscriptions?

KH: Well, no, the Sumerians, I don't know about the Sumerians particularly. I know the
Egyptians and the Babylonians, I guess that's the forerunner to the Sumerians, they
greatly exaggerated their history.

MS: You see in other words you're asking people to accept your point of view in a very
hypothetical perspective that you have to the same degree that you're saying all the of
science that's come down about the earth's age and about Neanderthals going back 100,000
years and all of this sort of thing. You're asking them to reject that on some of your
hypotheses that are speculation as well. The notion that you can create those layers in a
cavern, in a crater, for example, such as the Grand Canyon doesn't mean that, it means it
could have happened that quickly, it doesn't mean it did necessarily.

Siegel's finest exchange. Too bad Hovind sidetracked him in the next segment.

[snip digression on public schools, where Hovind says it is best to just not
teach origins at all]

KH: Ok, but they are, ok, so we're stuck with the situation, at least for today. Now,
since we are, what should they teach? I think you can teach the kids the names of the
bones and the muscles and teach 'em the biology, ok kid, here's your liver, here's your
spleen, here's how it works. And if a kid says, Well how did we get this?, at that point
the teacher should say, I'm sorry, we're not allowed to discuss origins because it's too
controversial, and no matter what I say, somebody will be upset.

Biology without any organizing principles. Kind of like memorizing bible
verses, I guess.

[snip more on origins]

MS: Now, lemme ask you,...define for us if you could, why you believe the earth is 6000
years old?

KH: Ok, well I would start off by saying, If you add up the dates given in the Bible,
it comes to about 6000. You know, the Bible says Adam was 130 when Seth was born, and Seth
was 105 when Enos was born. And I've read the Bible many scores of times, and studied it
for many years, and have never found anything wrong with it. Certainly has changed my
life, and I believe the Bible is literally true and scientifically accurate in all of all
of its, uh, when it deals with a scientific subject, it is absolutely correct.

Then Hovind also believes that:

1. emotions and wisdom reside in the heart, not the brain. See Exodus 4:14 and
4:20; Leviticus 19:17; Matthew 15:17-20; Ecclesiastes 8:16; and many more.

5. the value of "pi" is 3, not 3.1416..... (I Kings 7:23-26 and II
Chronicles 4:2-5)

6. striped and spotted lambs can be bred by placing peeled sticks in front of
the parents as they breed (Genesis 30:37-41)

7. the earth is a circle (nope, not a sphere) (Isaiah 40:22)

KH: Then when you look at the scientific evidence. For instance, the moon is going
around the earth. But the moon is leaving us 2-3"per year. It's slowly cycling out.
Because of a lot of complex physical factors. Bottom line is, the moon is leaving. Well,
that means it used to be closer. Now if you bring the moon back closer, the tides get
higher. Falling off with the inverse square law, actually, if you half [sic] the distance,
it would quadruple the attraction...Well somewhere in there the tides are gonna be so high
it's gonna erode the beach clear back to Chicago. In a hurry. And, uh, at one point two
billion years ago, the moon would be touching the earth. Now here they're trying to tell
the kids in school the earth is 4.6 billion years old. I look at this as a science teacher
and say, I'm sorry, it can't be. Now you might need 4.6 billion years to make your rock
turn into your prince, like your theory says, but it's just not available. ...And I can go
all day on the scientific evidence against the earth being billions of years old.

The trouble is that Hovind's so-called scientific evidence amounts to nothing
but another Fractured Fairy Tale. The real story on the earth/moon system is explained at The Recession of the Moonwhere physicist Tim Thompson discusses both recession and
tides in detail. The other "scientific arguments", Fractured Fairy Tales all,
are summarily discarded at Young-Earth Arguments: A Second Look.

KH: The only way you're gonna get 6000 is from the Bible.

Almost a true statement....finally. From a particular interpretation of the
bible, using a date that was inserted in the King James Version in 1701. Many Christians
do not accept this interpretation.

[snip speculation on the Sphinx, age of the Pyramids, alien construction, etc.,
BREAK]

CALLERS

Mark: Hey, great topic tonight , just what I'd like to talk about. The creationists -
they teach - I wouldn't want their teaching, their theology in the school either, because
it's just as wrong as the [sic]evolution I believe.
Evolution is pretty ridiculous if I think about it, but starting in Genesis, though, it
does not counterdict [sic] life before Adam and Eve. It's pretty clear, if you understand
just a little bit of ancient Aramaic the first word, "was", "the earth was
without form and void", that's really an impossible translation, because there was no
past tense of the "to be" verb. So the more accurate translation should be
"the earth became without form and void". And the other word - excuse me, tryin'
to slow down a little bit here so I can be clear - the second word "replenish",
he instructs the animals and Adam and Eve to replenish the earth. That insinuates there
was something there before, and considering the error in the translation in the King James
of that verb, that makes a lot of sense. [snip]

KH: Alright, thank you, Mark, for calling. What you're referring to as far as the word
"was" meaning Hebrew word "hava", "became"; you're talking
about the ruin/restoration theory, or the gap theory as it's commonly called. We cover
this in great detail on our videotape #2, but I'll give you a quick answer. In 1611, when
the word "replenish" was commonly used to just simply mean "fill", the
King James translators used the word "replenish" because the Hebrew word there
just simply called for "fill". God said, "Adam, go fill the earth." It
did not start to mean "fill" again in English until about 1650, and English
words change meanings from time-to-time. When I was a kid, the word "cool" meant
"not hot". Who knows what it means now. But, uh, English words simply change
meanings. So this is a case where it changed meanings from 1611, and there could not be
any life before Adam and Eve for all sorts of scriptural reasons. In Exodus 20 in the ten
commandments the bible says the lord made everything in six days: in heaven and earth the
sea and all that in them is." Ya know, he wrote that on a rock wid [sic] his own
finger. An' he don't stutter [sic]. Jesus said in Matthew 19:4 the creation of Adam and
Eve was the beginning. There was nothing before that. The end of, well it gets into the
gap theory and the day-age theory, and that's all, you know, we got a [sic] hour long
answer to that on videotape #2 of our 15 hour seminar. So I would disagree that there's
life before Adam. Adam was the first man. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 15:45, "Eve
is the mother of all living."

All living what? Bacteria? Dogs and cats? Apparently taking the bible literally
has its limits, even for Hovind!

KH: And it looks like some of what you're teaching is what Hugh
Ross teaches, you know about Adam being the first spirit-being. That there was actually
life before that. And I disagree totally, and I'll be debating Hugh Ross on the John Ankerberg
Show the end of this month. Uh, he's a real nice guy, but he's just dead-wrong on a couple
things, and I'm gonna straighten him out."

The tapes from the Ankerberg show are available at The John Ankerberg
Show. By the 10-22-00 show, both Ankerberg and Ross are clearly irritated by Hovind, his nasty comments about Ross, and his
myopic views. On one of these shows, Hovind admits that he knows no Hebrew, so this makes
his comments to Mark (above) an argument from ignorance.

Tom: There are two things that bother me right off the bat. One this comment about 912
years. There are a lot of people who operated on the basis of a lunar year, which would
have made that about 76 calendar years. And the other thing: the number of days that God
took to create things. I think it's rather presumptuous to assume that this is a 48 [sic]
hour day, especially since God is so much more than we are. How about that?

KH: Ok, well a couple of things. If you want to go with the lunar year idea, if you
read the scriptures, you'll find out two of the people - Enoch, and one other one, I
forget - were 65 when their son was born. So if you're gonna divide that by 12, that makes
him 5.5 years old when he becomes a daddy. I don't think so. They really were living to be
900 years old, and there's a lot of biological reasons why they could do that. In the
original creation, there was no genetic load. There [sic] were notdeformed
chromosomes, and they didn't suffer under the...You know, your gene code now is a copy off
a copy off a copy off a copy who knows how many times of Adam. And the fact that it even
works at all is pretty amazing. After all this copying process it's been through and plus
the hostile environment, we, and the extra things we throw at it.

If we are all copies of Adam, why aren't we all males? Why don't we all have
one X and one Y chromosome? There is no genetic evidence at all that all humans originated
from a single person. A recent article in The London Times
points out that "Women were the complete article long before men, a new study has
shown. Geneticists have found that female genes acquired their modern form 143,000 years
ago but the male version was not up and running for another 84,000 years. The result
overturns the Biblical description of women being created from a spare rib left over from
a man, and suggests that if Eve ever did meet Adam she was slumming it, genetically
speaking."

KH: And as far as[it's] presumptuous to say that God used
twenty-four hour days, God, God coulda done it in six seconds. I think he did it in six
days just to select, just to create a week for us. There's certainly no scientific reason,
there's no lunar reason or solar reason why we have a seven day week. But just about
every culture in the world operates on a seven day week. It's just like it's kind of
built-in. And I think that's [sic] remnants, people remembering from the original creation
when God established this seven day week. Nobody's ever been able to tell us why we have a
seven day week. Napoleon tried to change it to a ten day week and it was disaster for the
French in the revolution over there. So, I would disagree. I think they really were living
to be 900 years old, and um, could not be a lunar year for the reason I mentioned, you
know, they'd be five and six years old when they're havin' kids. That just doesn't happen.

Hovind is certainly selective in his miracles! He considers pre-flood people to
have built the pyramids, and asserts that their long lives conferred unusual intelligence
(ie, ark construction), says their chromosomes are in better shape than ours, then balks
at the idea of these superhumans fathering children at age five. The current youngest
father for whom I could find information is an eleven year-old in Great Britain. If
an eleven year-old can do it now, why preclude this possibility for a younger person
from this super race described by Hovind?

Concerning the calendar, Hovind needs a MAJOR history lesson. His assumption
must be that people are too ignorant or disinterested to investigate whether his claims
about a seven day week are accurate. Again, his information is just plain wrong:

"Every society has either invented the week or copied it from others. A
time unit longer than a day but smaller than a month is essential to human affairs. It was
originally intended to set aside special days for recurring activities such as worship and
marketing. Weeks of early peoples were not of the same length, but varied from one area to
another. Many primitive cultures used a four-day week, possibly in honor of the four
directions. Central American peoples used a five day interval; Assyrians had a six day
period; pre Christian Romans had periods of eight days called nundinae. For many
centuries, ancient Greeks (like Babylonians and Egyptians of the same period) divided
their thirty day months into three "decades" of ten days. Egyptians called their
ten-day period decans. Observation of the sky, in addition to originally fixing the
beginning of a day, also resulted in determining the length of our weeks. It stems from an
ancient and interesting tradition.", see Days.

The Jewish calendar is a modified Babylonian calendar. The
"tradition" referred to above is the seven day week gradually adopted by the
Babylonians, then assimilated by the Hebrews during their captivity there, see Larry Freeman's Calendar Origin Page.

Finally, the Maya adopted a religious calendar - the Tzolkin - based upon
twenty thirteen day periods, which one source attributes to the time period involved in
slash-and-burn corn agriculture The
Origin of the Maya Calendar.

Australian aboriginal peoples functioned with no weeks at all, but a rich astronomical
knowledge of
seasonal changes.

Paul: [snip] Now, um, I think it's fair to say the continents, particularly North
America and Europe were interlocked at one time like they were a puzzle piece. And I think
scientists have them pinpointed, I think it's three inches per year, and I was just
curious, basically what your view is on that.

KH: Ok, continental drift, you can get a long answer to that on my website, or in my
video #6. As far as Pangaea, the continents all fitting together, it's just baloney. It
didn't happen. I taught earth science for years,

Maybe it's not too late to get a tuition refund.

KH: and I'm tellin' you if you look at a map you will find out, in order to get
Pangaea, to get Africa and South America to fit together, for instance, they had to shrink
Africa 40%. They do not fit unless you shrink Africa 40%. You know, get an earth science
textbook and look up Pangaea, and you will see Mexico and all of Central America, you know
Belize, well, not Belize. Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama - they're all gone. They
took 'em out. They twisted two continents clockwise and twisted another one
counterclockwise.

I challenge anyone who buys this hooey to visit any of a number of great plate
tectonics sites, including Deconstructing Pangaea and The
Breakup of Pangeawhich
show the actual movement of the plates. What Hovind sees as a change in size
is either wishful thinking or a change in the type of map projection he is
used to seeing. As for Central America, it is not a matter of taking it out to
get the continents to fit; it is that much of Central America did not exist
until the Tertiary, a fact that can be substantiated by fossil and geological
evidence.

KH: Plus it's pretty obvious if you look at the world, if you take the water out of the
ocean, you'll find out there is dirt underneath. You know, these continents are not
floating around like lily pads in a bathtub. They are connected. It's just the low places
happen to be filled with water. That's all.

And this person claims to have taught earth science. No knowledge whatsoever of
the composition or structure of the earth's crust, nor any evidence that Hovind has ever
looked at a map of the world showing things like trenches, rifts, and other plate
boundaries. Jes' some good ol' water an' dirt!

KH: Continental drift theory, there's no question the continents are drifting a little
bit. I was just standing on top of the San Andreas Fault last week. I was speaking out in
California, and I'm goin' there again, let's see, day after tomorrow. So, I do, I've
studied the San Andreas Fault, the Hayward Fault, the New Madrid Fault, none of 'em my
fault, but I've been there, done that, have a T-shirt. There's no question they're moving
a little bit. The question is, How long has this been happening? And can we come to any
conclusions or assumptions because of this? What we know is they're moving a few cm per
year, sometimes a few inches per year. And that's it.

As anyone with even a minimal background in the earth sciences knows, that's
not "it" at all. One particularly congruent example confirming both plate
tectonics and the accuracy of radiometric dating can be found in the Hawaiian Islands. In
1838, geologist James Dana noted that the Hawaiian volcanoes were more heavily eroded as
he travelled from the southeast toward the northwest (ie, Hawaii much less eroded than
Kauai). He could conclude only that Kauai was older than Hawaii, but had no mechanism that
explained why this was so. When the Hawaiian islands were radiometrically dated, this
trend was confirmed, with Kauai being 5 million years older than Hawaii. When one follows
this chain of seamounts northwest from Hawaii, the increase in age (and erosion)
continues: Laysan - 19.9 million years; Midway - 27.7 million years; Suiko (near Japan) -
59.6 million years, see The Formation of the Hawaiian Islands.
There was no explanation for this trend until the advent of plate tectonics. The
ages are explained well if the volcanoes were formed as the Pacific Plate passed over a
hot spot; the hot spot that is currently forming the Loihi Seamount off the southeast
coast of Hawaii (the only part of the chain with active volcanoes). Assuming only that
plate velocities are similar to the rates measured today (and in Hawaii it's about ten cm
per year), one would expect to see a volcano that formed 27 million years ago to have
moved 2700 km from the hot spot. Midway is about 2400 km from the hot spot. Hovind can
neither explain these data away nor explain why, if radiometric dating doesn't work, there
is a trend in the Hawaiian Islands consistent with erosion patterns.

KH:As far as how long it's been going on, I think it all started at the time of the
flood, when the Bible says the fountains of the deep were broken up. I suspect there was a
lot more water under the crust of the earth, which is now on the surface. Which is why the
earth is 70% drowned. The Bible says in Psalm 136 and in Psalm 24 that the earth was, when
God built the earth, he made it, he founded it upon the seas. So apparently there was an
awful lot more water in the crust of the earth that is now upon the surface. And it
probably came shooting out when the fountains of the deep broke open along those fault
lines.

Here Hovind opens up a major can of worms that no young earth creationist has
addressed so far. If one is proposing that the "fountains of the deep" supplied
the water, then that water was originally under pressure. In 1983, Soroka and Nelson
explored the physical consequences of such an event, concluding that "Using the
geothermal gradient and assuming that water within pores would be as hot as the rocks
themselves, we estimate that the average temperature of the water would be 1600oC
... The consequences of liberating this much heat within the time limits stated in
Genesis would be that once again the Earth's surface and atmosphere would be raised to
such high levels that the passengers on the 'ark' could not possibly survive." If one
invokes a naturalistic explanation - in this case water beneath the earth - then one must
look at all of the aspects of such a proposal. Hovind never does this. Again, Noah-et-al
are "toast".

Rick: What I was wantin' to know is, so the supposition made so far is that the
universe as a whole is only 6000 years old. [snip] Well, have you not, like, taken a look
at the fact that there are things in the universe visible to us that are more than 6000
light years away?

KH: How do you know that? I believe you're right, and you are right, probably, but you
can't measure the star distance beyond about twenty light years. [snip] I taught
trigonometry for years. I'm tellin' ya, it just can't be done.

And the trigonometry was taught with all the talent he brought to the teaching
of earth science, I bet.

KH: Even twenty light years might be a stretch because the farthest you can get away
from an object on earth is 8000 miles. That's earth's diameter. So if you looked at a star
in January and you waited six months, and now you're on the opposite side of earth's
orbit, which is a huge circle, and then you look at the star again, you can get a little
bigger base to calculate the distance using parallax trigonometry. But even then, earth's
orbit around the sun, as huge as that is, is only sixteen light minutes in diameter. One
year has 525,000 minutes in it. Over half a million minutes in a year. And so to look at a
star one light year away, using opposite sides of our orbit as a base, which is as big a
circle as we can get, that's like having two surveyors 16" apart looking at a dot
8.25 miles away, and trying to calculate the distance using trigonometry. That's just for
one light year, and that is assuming you can tell where you were six months ago with any
amount of precision, which I doubt. Most astronomers will tell you 20-100 light-years is
the max you can measure using parallax,

"Most astronomers" would never say anything this incredibly ignorant.
Hovind went on this jag against Hugh Ross on the Ankerberg Show as well. Hovind doesn't
understand much about modern science; he certainly knows nothing about the degree of
sophistication in instrumentation. Proud of his ignorance, Hovind told Dr. Hugh Ross that
Ross was "crippled by your education". Not similarly crippled, Hovind is free to
dismiss all of modern astronomy using the "argument from personal incredulity",
another logical fallacy.

Physicist Tim Thompson (2000) comments: "The Hipparcos mission measured a
lot of parallaxes (over 100,000), some as small as 0.001 arc seconds, which translates
into distances as far away as 3260 light years." On the Ankerberg program, Dr. Ross
referred to parallaxes of 0.0001 arc seconds.

KH: so they go to other methods like red shift or luminosity which have all sorts of
serious problems, and wouldn't hold up two seconds in a court of law if they had to be
offered as evidence. The stars are probably billions of light-years away; I don't know.
Nobody knows; they probably are.

Thompson comments (2000): "Of course it's easy to dismiss what you don't
understand with a wave of the hand, but the reality is that those other, indirect distance
measures have a lot going for them. After parallax, the cepheid distance scale is the next
rung in the cosmic distance ladder, and so is crucial to the measure of long galactic and
extragalactic distances.

The bottom line for cepheids is that there exists a period-luminosity
relationship. If you measure the period, you can deduce the true luminosity. By comparing
the true luminosity to the apparent luminosity (what your eyes or telescope actually
sees), then you can derive the distance (because we know that the light intensity falls
off as the inverse square of the distance over non-hugely cosmic distances). All of this
was discovered back in 1912 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) at the Harvard College
Observatory (when she moved from volunteer to staff in 1902 she earned a salary of 30
cents per hour). Leavitt's discovery may be the single, most important discovery in all of
astronomy, but she and other early women astronomers remain essentially unknown outside of
the professional community.

Before Hipparcos there was no link between the cepheid and parallax distance
scales, as no cepheid variable star was close enough to Earth for a parallax distance
measure. Hipparcos changed all that by measuring the parallax for a number of cepheids.
Preliminary results showed that the cepheid distance scale pre-Hipparcos was probably
about 10% too short [M.W. Feast & R.M. Catchpole, Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society 286(1): L1ÄL5, March 21, 1997]. Considering that there were no
Earth-based parallaxes for any cepheid variables before, a 10% slip is not bad. It implies
that the cepheid distance scale is pretty close (there has been a lot of fiddling and
tweaking since then, and that 10% turns out to be too much, it was really better than
that).

Hovind thinks that the cepheid distance scale would not hold up in court, but I
suspect that his legal opinion is about as valuable as his scientific opinion. Now
calibrated by Hipparcos data, the cepheid scale would hold up in any court.

Cepheids are the primary extragalactic distance measurers too. Only a few
galaxies are close enough for cepheids to be seen from Earth, and that's how Hubble proved
that the Andromeda galaxy was a galaxy, and not a "nearby" nebula back in the
20s (thanks to Henrietta). Now the Hubble Space Telescope can see cepheids in galaxies as
far away as 50,000,000 light years or more, and that same cepheid distance scale is
directly tied by Hipparcos to the parallax distance scale".

KH: But we certainly do not know that the speed of light has always been constant. Last
month there was an article in the newspaper. I can find it here for you quickly on my
computer, where they speeded light up to 300X the speed of light. This was in [the] New
York Times, May 30, the year 2000. You can get it on newyorktimes.com; they cover that.
"Scientists claim they have broken the ultimate speed barrier, the speed of light.
Three hundred times the normal velocity of 186,000 miles per sec." At Harvard
University, a few months ago, they slowed light down to one mile per hour.

Thompson again (2000) : "Factually correct, but as usual, interpreted in
the light of ignorance instead of knowledge. Both of those neat tricks were accomplished
by establishing very weird conditions in a laboratory that are as close to impossible as
it gets in nature. The slowing of light was done in a superdense, supercold Bose Einstein
condensate; cosmological light will never encounter such a thing. The speeding up of light
(which does not violate any law of physics by the way) was done in an artificially
"supercooled" gas with two Raman pump lasers, which are very unusual in the
intergalactic environment.

But indeed, it is true that we don't know that the speed of light has always
been a constant, and there are a number of legitimate "variable speed of light"
cosmologies on the drawing board. But we have pretty good reasons to believe that the
speed of light has been constant throughout that part of spacetime that we can see (the
strongest evidence regards the constancy of the Fine Structure Constant)."

On the Ankerberg Show, an exasperated Dr. Hugh Ross also pointed out the
support for a constant speed of light via the hyperfine splitting.

[snip]

Matthew: Yes, Dr. Ken - is it Bovine?

KH: Hovind. H-O-V Hovind.[snip]

Matthew: Ok, I want to make a point. I notice you were happy to include history and
other cultures to substantiate that there was a golden age where people lived for
thousands of years cuz you mentioned the Greeks and the Sumerians. But when it comes down
to; things that agree with your paradigm [sic]. But when you refer to the Sumerians that
they say things that don't agree with your paradigm, you reject them. So you just, you
know, if it substantiates your position, history or mythology, you accept it. If it
doesn't meet your paradigm, you reject it. Because if you look into the golden ages of
those other cultures, they'll say that that yes there is a golden age, but that golden age
lasted, for instance in the Hindu calendar, for 700,000 years. The previous yuga. So
you'll reject that part, but you'll, you know what I mean?

KH: Oh sure.

Matthew: You talked about Adam and Eve as the first created beings. Sure, but they said
that the Anunnakis, that was the first genetically-engineered humans by the Anunnaki. And
"Anunnaki" means "from those who came from heaven". So you'll reject,
you know, I mean, like, we could go on and on about this, but basically you're being very
prejudicial to your own point of view.

KH: Oh, I think probably everybody is. I'm sure you would be too. I believe the Bible
is literally true and scientifically accurate, and I know of no mistakes in it. And I
would defend that against anybody. If you know of some, I'd like to see it [sic]. I think
you'd find these other cultures, these other writings, you find all sorts of obvious
scientific errors. You know, like the earth is on top of a giant turtle. You know, which
is standing on top of a big elephant. [snip] I think that when you get the big question
though, since some of these things are not known, should we make all the taxpayers pay to
have them taught as if it's [sic] a fact? I'm comin' up to speak in Ontario here pretty
soon. I've spoke [sic] at the University of Guelph, and I've seen all your texts. Not all,
but a lot of the textbooks up there. You teach the same things they teach down here in the
United States: that, you know, the earth is millions of years old. They just state it
dogmatically like, I was there. And, you know, that's just not fair.

Matthew: I think the main problem is, there, Ken, that people have their own points of
view, and they believe them wholeheartedly. [snip]

KH: OK, Do you believe the earth is billions of years old?

Matthew: I believe this universe is really old. I mean billions, yes.

KH: Ok. Were you listening when I said the moon is moving away a couple inches a year?
[snip]

Matthew: Ok, well, the moon moving out 2" a year. You say we don't know if that is
a constant. But, you know, there is a theory that the moon came out of the earth. So,
obviously it would have been touching the earth. It woulda came [sic] from the earth.
We're just talkin' theory now, I realize. But I don't think you've looked at all the
theories.

KH: Oh, I have. You can call J P Dawson<jpdawson.com>. Mr. Dawson is the one who
dated the moon rocks. When he was working for NASA, he was in charge of their science
division. I said, "Mr. Dawson, how old is the moon?" He said, "I don't
know." He said "I'm the one who dated it. We got these rocks. We dated 'em. We
got samples from." He said "Sometimes we'd get, from the same rock, we'd get a
few thousand years for a date, and 2 billion for a date." He said "I don't have
a clue how old it is, and nobody does." But NASA goes out and they publish a 4.6
billion, just so it matches the textbooks age of the earth.

This prompted me to visit JP Dawson's website, which had an
extensive biography. It
was pretty obvious that, though Dawson had worked for NASA, his area of expertise was
concerned with thermal properties of the rocks, and he had NEVER dated a lunar rock.
Obviously there is a substantial misrepresentation here, but by whom - Hovind, Dawson, or
both? I decided to get more information by emailing both Hovind and Dawson. Here are the
emails:

Dawson's reply (9-1-00): Hey Karen --The moon rocks were studied by many different people
-- all agree that we can not determine the actual date they were formed --
most of the rocks were composites of various minerals that were not formed at the same
time. the webpage contains the info on the decay of the speed of light --
and it is still a matter of much discussion within the scientific community. Many will not
accept it regardless of the data. NASA stopped promoting the idea of 4 billion years
because of the dating measurements on the Genesis rock (see webpage) --
the answers were inconsistent. I am sure "K" believes that secular science is
right but we can not support that theory with the moon rocks. I don't know if this helps
-- but I can only relate what we did -- I cannot prove a
negative. Thanks for your interest. JP

I replied (9-5-00): But you didn't answer my question about whether what was
said about you *dating* rocks was true or false. It's obvious that you worked on lunar
samples, but you didn't date them, did you?

Dawson replied: all agree that we can not determine the actual date they
were formed

I replied: All do not agree; this is a gross overgeneralization. Most
disagree heartily with you. Some certainly would say that some dates may indicate the time
of metamorphism rather than formation.

Dawson replied: NASA stopped promoting the idea of 4 billion years
because of the dating measurements on the Genesis rock (see webpage) -- the answers were
inconsistent. From the
NASA website.

last night regarding the Genesis Rock: "anorthosite", "almost entirely
composed of plagioclase", "about 4 billion years old" but "a norite
sample...is about 4.5 billion years old, virtually as old as the moon itself." The
rock is difficult to date because it is *not* composed of several minerals. The maria
basalts date consistently to 3.2-3.9 billion years old, and some of the plutonic stuff to
4-4.5 billion years. Some rocks have had their clocks reset by later impacts, and would
thus give younger dates. If you have contrary information or evidence of fraud, I suggest
you go public.

I don't know if this helps - but I can only relate what we did - I cannot
prove a negative. Thanks for your interest. JP

I replied: You really never said what you did. I hope you can clear this
up.

AND I NEVER HEARD FROM JP DAWSON AGAIN!

Hovind's reply (9-12-00): What makes you think the
moon is billions of years old? Are you ready for another debate yet? We can do it at your
college if you like. KH

I replied (9-14-00): You dodged my question, as
usual, bud. But that's ok. Your reply is very useable "as is".

Hovind replied(9-22-00): You never answered my
question. When do you want another debate? KH

I replied (9-25-00): Only because you blew off my
question, and it was such a simple one: So, bud, who was lying? You or Dawson? This is a
very simple question requiring a one-word answer. Here - check one of the following:

____ I was ______ Dawson was

Hovind replied(9-26-00): Mr. Dawson told me on the phone that they got
dates ranging from a few thousand to several billion from the moon rocks. When is the next
debate? We can do it at your college in front of your students. I will pay my own way. KH

I replied (9-27-00): Did you bother to check and see who "they" were?
Or that Dawson had nothing to do with it? Careful as usual, huh? I have a much better
idea. I will be happy to engage you in a written debate on the New Mexicans for Science
and Reason website. That way people will actually have a chance to think about what you
are saying.

Hovind replied(9-27-00): Walt Brown at creationscience.com is looking for
someone to do a written debate. I don't have time right now.

Conclusion: Hovind passed along inaccurate information, repeating
what Dawson told him without checking it out.

[snip]

Susan: To me, the same being, which to me is God, created the universe, the world, all
the beings, and all the beings on other planets. What is the problem with that? And at the
same time, we, he also gave us free will, free choice, and consequences. We get into
discussions like this, which make for wonderful radio talk shows. I would imagine that was
part of [garbled] visions. But is there some reason this could not have happened?

KH: Well, as far as beings on other planets, ah, we're [sic] pretty well proven that
there are no intelligent beings on the other planets we can see around our sun. Our solar
system.

Susan: Is there some reason that the god could not have done this?

KH: Oh, he certainly could have. I don't know what he did. You know, he can do whatever
he wants. But nobody's ever proven the existence of other planets. There was one guy, big
article published, we saw other planets around that other star, you know. The stars are
just simply too far away. It turned out later it was a wobble in his telescope base that
was making a shadow that he thought was a planet. I don't know if there's [sic] planets
around other stars or not. [snip] So far, at least, again, if it was in a court of law, it
would be extremely shaky evidence, and it has not been proven that there are other planets
besides these nine around our sun. And there certainly, I think, has not been proven
there's life on any of those. People ask me if there's intelligent life on other planets.
And I say, Man, I taught high school 15 years. There's not much intelligent life on *this*
planet. [snip]

It would sure have been affirming to have had Hovind for a teacher, yes? Again,
Hovind's explanation is but a Fractured Fairy Tale of the true state of "planet
hunting". It is no longer the work of "one guy", but of several
high-powered research groups with instruments capable of measuring Doppler wobbles to
better than 3 parts in 108 (Discover, March 2000). A newer, even-more-sensitive technique
measures the drop in brightness as a planet transits across the face of a star (Scientific
American, September 2000). About fiftyplanets have been
confirmed using one or other of these methods.

MS: Well, how do [you] deal with the question of, for example, Hindu belief, or
Buddhist belief? Or the Koran, or other so-called bibles or religious books that other
religions follow? Are they all wrong, and the Old and New Testaments are right, in your
view?

KH: Yeah, those folks all need to come to my seminar. I can straighten 'em out. Won't
be a problem.

[snip, break]

Dorothy: I have a question for the doctor. He says that Adam and Eve are the only
people on the planet. I'd like to know where Cain got his wife.

KH: Well, if you read Genesis chapter 5, the Bible says in verse #3 that Adam lived
after he begat Seth, 800 years, and begat sons and daughters. You could have an awful lot
of kids in 800 years. They married sisters. [snip]

MS: But that's an interesting point, because we know that that kind of procreation
leads to various kinds of increased incidence of problems and aberrations.

KH: It does now because we have such a genetic load. Average person has 3500 defective
genes. But that would not be the case when the race was pure and clean.

Whoa, Nellie, let's think about this. According to information from the human
genome project, humans have only about 50,000 genes, and Hovind wants us to believe that
3500 of these, on the average, are defective? I think he has been spending too much time
reading comic books about mutants. The reality is that Hovind's information concerning
biology is as bad as his statements about earth science and astronomy. The average human
has FIVE, count 'em, FIVE, lethal mutations. See
Genetic Screening and Ethics an Overview.
Not 3500. No way.

MS: What race?

KH: The human race. [snip] There's a human race, and different skin colors, and
different racial, what we call racial characteristics. There's [sic] several theories
about where those come in. Probably the best theory is that the Tower of Babel, which
would have been a few hundred years after the flood, is where the races began. When god
confused the languages, they went off into their small groups, all speakin' the same
language. And if you get a small in-breeding group, you know, 2000 years after the
creation, you're gonna get genetic disorders, and racial traits could be a result of this
Tower of Babel incident. But I think that there's no question from scripture and from
science that all humans are the same race, and have the same genetic code, and certainly
can interbreed. So there's no reason scripturally to be a racist. You know, we all came
from Adam and Eve, and then later from Noah and his family. [snip]

KH: [in response to a long, convoluted discussion of microevolution by caller, Jeff]
Ok, as far as, all we've ever seen is [sic]changes within the same kind. For instance, at
Sea World, or Sea Life, in San Diego. I just read the article today. But I forget where it
was. They have a whal-fin. Where
they took a killer whale and a dolphin, and crossed it [sic]. And then the wolphin, or
whatever they're calling it, is now ten years old, and it had a baby. So it's not sterile,
like most crosses are. But if you stand 100 feet away and look at a killer whale and a
dolphin, you'll say, you know that looks like the same "kind" of animal. The
Bible uses the word kind, and not species. And just because some people have decided that
a dog, a wolf, and a coyote are different species, does not mean god decided it's a
different "kind" of animal. Speciation happens, by our modern definition of
speciation, but no evolution ever happens.

This Fractured Fairy Tale contains several misstatements of fact. Kekaimalu,
now fifteen years old, is a cross between an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin (Turisops
truncatus) and a FALSE killer whale (Pseudoorca crassidens), not the much larger
black-and-white "Free Willy"(Orcinus orca). No one has ever crossed a
dolphin and an orca. (Elsberry, private
communication, and Cetaceans. She lives and performs at the Sea Life Park in Hawaii and has interesting characteristics
of her mixed heritage (intermediate size; 66 teeth vs 88 for bottlenose
dolphins and 44 for false killer whales). Her female calf, fathered by
another bottlenose dolphin, was born in 1991, and looks very much like a
bottlenose dolphin, see Sea
Life Lore

Such interspecies breeding is hardly unknown. Though mules are normally infertile,
there are several accounts of mules giving birth, sometimes to fertile offspring.
"Blue Moon" was born in Nebraska in 1984. His mother was a mule, a
donkey/Welsh pony cross. The same donkey was Blue Moon's father.
Chromosomally, Blue Moon was a mule. In Brazil in 1986, a mule mated with a
stallion, and gave birth to an animal that chromosomally was pure horse (Travis, 1990).

The problem with Hovind's "stand back and look at it" definition is the
lack of quantification. Perhaps horses and donkeys are the same
"kind" (or in scientific terms, still capable of some degree of interbreeding).
Perhaps the same is true of some whale species. But neither Hovind nor any
other young-earth creationist can define what constitutes "speciation" and what
constitutes "evolution" beyond the "stand back and look at it" test.

Hovind seems to favor the dog, wolf, and coyote as being part of the same
"kind". What about foxes? Raccoons? Hyenas? What is and is not part of the
"dog kind"?

How about horses and zebras? They kind of look alike when I stand 100 feet away, but they
don't seem to be able to interbreed. Is there a barrier to reproduction between
horses and zebras? Have creationists ever tried this experiment? And with
which "kind" of zebra? If chromosome number is an indicator of a kind,
then one runs into a real problem with zebras and horses: horses have 64, but Przewalski's
horse has 66 and donkeys have 62. Hartman's zebra has 32, plains zebra has 44, and
Grevy's zebra has 46. Six different "kinds", or two, or one?

If chromosome numbers are unimportant, then what puts chimpanzees (48) and humans (46) in
different "kinds"? Human chromosome 2, the second largest, is a fused version of
two chimp chromosomes.

It was Karl Linneaus, whom creationists love to call their own, who said, "I demand
of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character, by which to
distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none...But if I had
called a man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of all the
ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so" (Futuyma
1982). Obviously, when Linneaus "stood back and looked", he saw apes and
humans as the same "kind".

If someone like Hovind postulates that, for example, dogs, wolves, and coyotes are all one
"kind", and there were only two of them on the ark, then Hovind is the BIGGEST
EVOLUTIONIST of all time, since he would be proposing that this diversification into dogs
and wolves andcoyotes (and foxes?) occurred in a few HUNDRED years, a
rate evolutionists consider laughable.

KH: [snip] It does illustrate the point that since neither side can prove their point, why do all sides have to pay for the evolution-religion to be taught? I mean, I
can't prove mine, he can't prove his. So how come I gotta pay for his to be taught?
Heehee, this is just not fair. It's certainly unconstitutional, to establish a religion of
evolution at taxpayer's expense. And so that's what I'm saying. You mentioned, you said
there's scientific evidence for evolution.

MS: Well, I just want to interject one thing about that statement, because *in your
opinion* it's unconstitutional, but the courts have not said that unconstitutional to
teach evolution in the public schools.

KH: I don't think that's been tested in the courts. You know, the creation has been
tested many times, but I think it's about time we sue some teacher, especially for
teaching false information.

Say, I have a great idea! Hovind could use his $250,000 to do just this. Use it
to sue "some teacher" for spreading "false information". I hereby
challenge Hovind to pursue this, as he has been challenged to produce evidence for his
many false statements before. I won't be holding my breath.

MS: Well, if you have, I'm only making the point that at the moment there is no
definitive statement from the US Supreme Court, which is the arbiter of the Constitution-
best we can do- that what you said is correct. And it is not the case that evolution has
been prohibited.

KH: Ok, I would say I *believe* that evolution is a religion and should be prohibited.

MS: Ok, fair enough. That's a perfectly good statement.

Conclusion

Kent Hovind is able to propagate his Fractured Fairy Tales of Science via the
internet, videotape, and through personal appearances in churches and schools. His
message appeals to those who are unaware that his "evidence" is without merit.
Unfortunately, since there is a general lack of scientific literacy, this
translates to a large number of people. My purpose in writing this review is to expose
these assertions of Hovind's for what they are: inaccurate, sometimes out-of-context,
frequently outdated non-explanations of the way the world is. In critiquing each segment
and providing references for further study, it is my hope that this document will be a
resource for those who have to mount a counterattack when Kent Hovind comes to town.

References

Ankerberg J. Ross vs Hovind radio debates. Available from http://www.ankerberg.org Accessed various times in
October and November 2000.

Theobald D. Proofs of macroevolution or scientific evidences for the theory of
common descent with gradual modification. 2000. Available from
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/.
Accessed June 8, 2000.